Chalabigate

2004-08-01

Who is Larry Franklin?

Franklin, a colonel in the US Air Force Reserve, served in the past as an attache at the US embassy in Israel, one source told The Jerusalem Post.

A US Embassy spokesman in Tel Aviv said, "the Embassy has no comment on this issue."

Sources in Jerusalem said it is quite possible that Larry Franklin, the alleged Pentagon informant, met with AIPAC officials as part of routine conversations lobbyists always have with officials, but that it is inconceivable this is something that could be construed as espionage.

The FBI's investigation of Larry Franklin began not long after it was leaked that the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans sent two Defense officials, one of them Franklin, to Paris to meet with a dissident Iranian arms trader.

The latter, Manucher Ghorbanifar, played a central role in the Iran-Contra affair – in which Israel had a major involvement – in the mid 1980's.

Now who's Manucher Ghorbanifar? Here's details of his meeting with Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin in Paris in 2001:

What was international man of mystery Manucher Ghorbanifar up to when he met with top Pentagon experts on Iran? In a NEWSWEEK interview in Paris last month, Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian spy who helped launch the Iran-contra affair, says one of the things he discussed with Defense officials Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin at meetings in Rome in December 2001 (and in Paris last June with only Rhode) was regime change in Iran. Ghorbanifar says there are Iranians capable of organizing a peaceful revolution against the ruling theocracy. He says his contacts know where Saddam Hussein hid $340 million in cash. With American help, he says, this money could be retrieved and half used to overthrow the ayatollahs.

Of course, this must go all the way down the neocon nexus, so here's a good background piece on Harold Rhode, the Feith underling who could be involved.
I've been traveling all day so I'm playing catch up on this thing, but I've got a suspicion that if AIPAC was involved in this, their senior foreign policy analyst Steve Rosen must have at least been aware.
Another area that bears investigation is JINSA, the Israeli think tank linking the neocons, the Jewish lobby and Turkish and Israeli intelligence. Here's some good background from Jason Vest:

Almost thirty years ago, a prominent group of neoconservative hawks found an effective vehicle for advocating their views via the Committee on the Present Danger, a group that fervently believed the United States was a hair away from being militarily surpassed by the Soviet Union, and whose raison d'être was strident advocacy of bigger military budgets, near-fanatical opposition to any form of arms control and zealous championing of a Likudnik Israel. Considered a marginal group in its nascent days during the Carter Administration, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 CPD went from the margins to the center of power.

Just as the right-wing defense intellectuals made CPD a cornerstone of a shadow defense establishment during the Carter Administration, so, too, did the right during the Clinton years, in part through two organizations: the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP). And just as was the case two decades ago, dozens of their members have ascended to powerful government posts, where their advocacy in support of the same agenda continues, abetted by the out-of-government adjuncts from which they came. Industrious and persistent, they've managed to weave a number of issues--support for national missile defense, opposition to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons systems, arms aid to Turkey and American unilateralism in general--into a hard line, with support for the Israeli right at its core.

In the late 1990's, JINSA sponsored a series of lectures by Ahmed Chalabi.
Oh yeah, Ghorbinfar is a close associate of Michael Ledeen, whose daughter, Simone, works for the CPA. More later I'm sure.

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